Why Is Our President Thinking About What He Would Tell ISIS if He Were Advising Them?

Today on NRO THEODORE DALRYMPLE: Jihadis from Britain are acting out a brutality learned at home. Islam's Nightclub Brawl. DAVID GELERNTER: A letter to the Muslim students protesting Ayaan Hirsi Ali's lecture. 'Free' Speech at Yale. DAVID FRENCH: Some libertarians see the Islamic State as a threat to the U.S., and they support military action. Libertarian Hawks. TOM ROGAN: As horrific as the kidnappings are, paying to return hostages will only result in more dead Westerners. Obama Was Right on Kidnappings. SLIDESHOW: The Batmobile. Morning Jolt . . . with Jim Geraghty September 15, 2014 Why Is Our President Thinking About What He Would Tell ISIS if He Were Advising Them? A strange presidential comment, revealed to the world Sunday by the New York Times: But the president said he had already been headed toward a military response before the men's deaths. He added that ISIS had made a major strategic error by killing them because the anger it generated resulted in the American public's quickly backing military action.   You know you want to come! Get complete info at NRCruise.com.   If he had been "an adviser to ISIS," Mr. Obama added, he would not have killed the hostages but released them and pinned notes on their chests saying, "Stay out of here; this is none of your business." Such a move, he speculated, might have undercut support for military intervention. Why is our president thinking about what he would tell the Islamic State if he were advising them? Does the president spend a lot of time thinking about this? Or did it just strike him as a fascinating little nugget of insight to share with a guest while discussing the Islamic State? I can see the value in trying to understand the thinking of your enemy. I can see the value in thinking through an ultimatum to the group, contemplating what you'll demand and what consequences to threaten. You can "offer advice" to a foe in the sense of, "Don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry." But Obama's "if I was an adviser to ISIS" comment doesn't sound like any of these -- at least from the context that we're given by the Times' sources, individuals who have met with the president in the past week. It's just, hey, if I were advising the enemy, this is what I would have told them. Okay . . . what's the point? Why spend any time thinking about that scenario? Did the Islamic State call and ask for advice? They didn't attach notes; they detached heads. That's the choice they made. Now the question is what we're going to do about it. Notice Obama's assessment presumes the Islamic State wants to avoid a U.S. military intervention. Is this a manifestation of the mirroring effect, where Obama projects its own values and priorities onto its foes? (Think about how often he insists publicly that seizing Crimea and moving into Ukraine isn't in Russia's interest, or that bellicose or provocative actions on the part of Iran aren't in that country's interest.) The Islamic State appears to want to send the message, far and wide, that they don't fear a clash with the U.S. military. Perhaps they want to demonstrate that they can commit horrific crimes against American civilians with no serious repercussion. Maybe they think God wants them to do this. Maybe they're nuts! In the end, the "why" matters less than the "what." Viewed from another angle, President Obama's comment sounds like a complaint. If the Islamic State hadn't beheaded Americans, there wouldn't be such widespread demand for action against it in the American public. "If I were advising ISIS…" Well, you're not, Mr. President. What, are you looking for another job? Some sort of freelance consulting gig on the job, when you clock out as commander-in-chief? Walter Russell Mead: It is probably true that a lower profile by ISIS would have made it more difficult to win support for airstrikes in the United States and around the world, but that's hardly the point. ISIS is a master of the pornography of politics and the pornography of perverted religion: slave girls, heads on spikes, executions uploaded to the Internet, naked defiance in the face of its enemies. ISIS isn't trying to win a conventional geopolitical chess match, it wants to electrify millions of potential supporters and change the nature of the game. The execution of American hostages succeeded brilliantly, from an ISIS point of view. It has made President Obama look weak, forced him to change his entire Middle East policy and brought the jihadi movement back into the world spotlight. The politics of spectacle has eclipsed Al-Qaeda, weakened Assad's position, drawn the awe and admiration of jihadi wanna-bes and funders, and elevated 30,000 thugs and nutjobs to a major force in global events. Yes, that elevation carries with it the risk of serious pushback and even conventional military defeat, but jihadi ideology has benefited enormously from what ISIS has accomplished so far. ISIS still isn't going to conquer the world, but radical Islam is closer than ever to launching the clash of civilizations of which bin Laden dreamed. ISIS has much less money that President Obama does, many fewer fighters, much less equipment and in every other conventional measure of power it is a pipsqueak compared to the Leader of the Free World. But who is acting, and who is reacting? Who is dancing to whose tune? Are we about to learn what happens when the United States goes to war with a commander-in-chief who doesn't really want to go to war? With a president who's ordering a particular military action because he feels he has to in order to placate public opinion, but that he has deep doubts about? How can that possibly turn out well? Josh Jordan: "Shorter Obama: If I were advising ISIS, I'd tell them not to execute Americans on video so I can keep pretending they aren't a threat to us." Ladd Ehlinger Jr.: "Ah yes, I remember when FDR thought-experimented an advisorship position with Imperial Japan." Doug Powers: "Obama also probably would have advised ISIS to pin OFA donation envelopes and voter registration forms to the shirts of released hostages." Iowahawk to the president: "If you were advising ISIS, they would be bankrupt." What the Heck Is Going on in the Illinois Governor's Race? Dear Illinois voters . . . What's up with how you're responding to pollsters about your governor's race? Are you starting to mess with them, just for fun? Because here's how you've been feeling all summer . . . And then this weekend: The poll found Quinn at 48 percent support compared with 37 percent for Rauner, with 8 percent undecided. And 5 percent went to little-known Libertarian candidate Chad Grimm -- support that likely would have gone to Rauner if Republican forces had been able to knock the Libertarian Party slate off the ballot. The poll, conducted Sept. 3 through Friday by APC Research Inc., featured interviews on landlines and cellphones with 800 registered voters. It has an error margin of 3.5 percentage points and a confidence level of 95 percent. That means if it were possible to contact every likely voter registered in Illinois, it could be said with 95 percent certainty that the results would differ by no greater or less than 3.5 percent. From a steady Rauner lead to a Quinn lead of 11? Okay, maybe some of this can be attributed to the sample . . . Helping fuel Quinn's early advantage was the poll's finding that 43 percent of voters identified themselves as Democrats while only 24 percent called themselves Republicans and 28 percent said they were independents. The partisan split is identical to a Tribune poll in fall 2008, when home state Democrat Barack Obama made his first bid for the White House, and also represents a high-water mark for Democrats in Illinois in a nonpresidential year since 1998. Yeah, but Obama's not on the ballot and it's not a presidential election year, so one would be surprised to see Democrat turnout so high. Is it just TV ads? Last month also marked one of the rare periods where Quinn outspent the deep-pocketed Rauner on broadcast advertising -- about $1.97 million for the Democrat compared with more than $1 million for the Republican. Or is it that Illinois voters are suckers for the old anti-Romney playbook? When voters were asked which of the two major candidates was more in touch with people like themselves, 49 percent cited Quinn while 30 percent cited Rauner. But 20 percent said neither or that they didn't know. Why Don't We Dress Nicely When We Fly? Let Me Tell You! Slate's J. Bryan Lowder offers a nice idea that I suspect most readers will find impractical, an attempt to restore the tradition of dressing nicely when traveling: However, the primary reason I make the extra effort to plan my travel outfit is because, well, no one else does. Among the cavalcade of pajama pants, tracksuits, nightgowns, painting rags, and ill-fitting sweatshirts that one encounters in the world's terminals and stations these days, the competently dressed individual stands apart as a beacon of civilized life, an island of class amid a swamp of schlumps. By dressing myself as a decent human being who is aware that he is in public, I like to think I am performing a small act of resistance against the increasingly slobbish status quo . . . Now, before I'm accused of elitism, understand that I am not calling for a three-piece suit on every JetBlue hop or Megabus jaunt (though that would not have been abnormal mere decades ago), nor do I mean to dictate what you should wear within the tinted confines of your own car. I am simply suggesting that, when traveling by public means, each of us dress "nicely" or "respectably" according to our means. I used to try to dress nicely when traveling by plane; I believed passengers who dressed more formally got treated better. This is still probably true in general, but I've now traveled enough to know that a suit and tie are no shield against an unhelpful gate agent, dour stewardess, or power-mad TSA agent. I've been upgraded to business class a few times, and we all know the score. Your treatment while traveling doesn't depend upon how you dress as much as where you sit. All men are created equal, but in the airliner, it's pre-revolutionary France. Up front is aristocracy, refilling those drinks and stretching out in all that legroom. Behind that curtain, we're cattle. Just jam us in and get us there. I could be wearing a tuxedo and they would still nail my shoulder with the beverage cart every time. Lowder skips over one of my hard-learned lessons, that air travel is just a nonstop gauntlet of opportunities for a permanent stain on whatever I'm wearing: small seats, eating on the run, seatmates spilling drinks or salad dressing from their tiny trays, turbulence as I sip my drink, you name it. Better it ruin casual clothes than something I need to wear when I get there. Real talk: Don't travel in any clothes that you absolutely, positively need to look good in upon arrival. Travel includes a lot of variables: Is my flight going to be delayed? Are they going to change my gate and I'm going to have to run across the airport? Do we have one of those moving-walkway gates or is this one where I have to take a shuttle bus out to the tarmac? How long am I going to be waiting for checked luggage? How clean is the cab I'm going to get in? (Perhaps in time, Uber will alleviate that problem.) Throw in sweat from running through the airport, lugging the suitcase, humid locales ("On behalf of your flight crew, I would like to welcome you to Dallas, where the ground temperature is 93 and the humidity is 240 percent.") and you are not going to look and smell ready for a meeting upon arrival. ADDENDA: Here's how yesterday's appearance on MediaBuzz with Howard Kurtz went . . . Alain de Botton: "Napoleon said: To understand someone, you have to understand what the world looked like when they were twenty." Don't delay! 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